I. The Praetorians

They were her darkest days yet as First Lady, though there would be far worse to come. In 1994, after her health-care-reform plan imploded and her party suffered a devastating midterm defeat, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, Maggie Williams, gathered 10 women whose opinion Clinton held dear. The group included Mandy Grunwald, senior media consultant to the president, whose ties to the Clintons went back to the 1992 campaign; Susan Thomases, who had worked as the Clintons’ personal lawyer during the campaign; and Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton’s scheduler and later the first head of her 2008 presidential campaign. Called the “Chix meeting” by one participant, the group had been getting together to discuss the First Lady’s agenda, and the conversations usually ranged widely—to media strategy, policy debates, political fights, personal lives. The off-the-record gatherings were an outgrowth of her regular staff meetings, which were scheduled for an hour but often went for two or three and into the evening. A few bottles of wine might be opened, and the women would talk about “who was dating whom, who was cute,” and “whose kids were going to the prom,” according to one of the Chix I spoke with recently. In the weeks after the midterm defeat, the meetings were “healing” ones and designed to be “nutrition for the soul,” this participant said.

During one such meeting, toward the end of 1994, Clinton walked into the room and the distress of the past weeks and months spilled out. She fought back tears, and was “quite emotional.” She told the group that she was sorry—sorry if she had let people down, sorry if she had contributed to the recent political losses, as indeed she had. The health-care overhaul, on which Bill Clinton had campaigned so hard, and which he’d handed over to Hillary upon his election, had failed spectacularly under her leadership—undercut by the insurance industry’s aggressive opposition to it, and by her secrecy and high-handedness. Clinton told the group that she was considering withdrawing from the kind of policy and political work that had defined her. “This was all my fault,” she said, according to the participant. She didn’t want to damage her husband’s administration.

Years later, in her memoir Living History, Clinton herself described this moment in trademark humblebrag style: “One by one,” she wrote, “each woman told me why I couldn’t give up or back down. Too many other people, especially women, were counting on me.” As we well know, Clinton didn’t back down. She stayed in the game and has stayed in it ever since. The anecdote as Clinton conveyed it seemed designed to make three points. First, she is not in politics to slake her own ambitions. Second, she’s a fighter. And third, if it hadn’t been for this circle of nurturing intimates, she couldn’t possibly have gone on.

Throughout her many years in public life—through all the disappointments and triumphs, the scandals real or alleged—Clinton has surrounded herself with protectors: a tightly knit Praetorian Guard, mute and loyal. The result has been the opposite of what was intended. When troubles arise—sometimes of Clinton’s own making, sometimes not—she retreats into a defensive crouch, shielding herself inside a cocoon of secrecy, with a small circle of intimates standing watch. With each new round of trouble and scandal, the circle seems to draw tighter. The penchant for secrecy—for all operations to be closely and privately held—increases by yet another increment. But this never proves to be a solution. The secrecy and the closed nature of her dealings generate problems of their own, which in turn prompt efforts to restrict information and draw even more tightly inside a group of intimates. It is a vicious circle. The current controversy over Clinton’s State Department e-mails—the use of a private “clintonemail.com” account for government business—is a classic case in point.

Clinton’s way of doing business is by now so entrenched that it is hard to imagine she could ever behave differently. And the people around her have their own interests to consider. There certainly are many who believe in Clinton. But, for some, she is also the world’s most high-maintenance and high-profile meal ticket. To get into her circle, one must behave with extraordinary loyalty. Once you’re in, it’s like Fight Club. The first rule is to never talk about it. The State Department e-mails provide ample evidence of the hermetic circle that exists around Clinton—a world of gatekeepers and advisers, but favor seekers too. “I consider you to be the best friend and the best person I have met in my long life,” wrote Lanny Davis, a Washington lawyer and longtime Clinton associate, who went on in the e-mail to ask Hillary for some help. A top aide, after a television appearance by Clinton, wrote to her of the public reaction: “Three people even told me they teared up.” Another top aide sent Clinton an e-mail, linking to a video of Hillary dancing, with the subject line “Secretary of Awesome.”

II. Control, Control, Control

Hillary Clinton’s network is vast and stretches beyond those involved in her 2016 political operation. Compiling a list of people in the innermost circle is like giving thanks in an Oscar speech—someone is always going to be left out. Twenty-five years ago the group would mainly have consisted of women, but that’s no longer the case. John Podesta, who was chief of staff during Bill Clinton’s second term, is the chair of the campaign. Huma Abedin, one of Clinton’s longest-serving aides, is the vice-chair. Mandy Grunwald is a senior adviser. Robby Mook, the campaign manager, helped Clinton win Nevada in 2008 and more recently steered Terry McAuliffe, himself a Clintonite, to the governorship of Virginia. Cheryl Mills, who defended Bill Clinton during the impeachment proceedings, and Maggie Williams, both of them alpha girls in Hillaryland, have no official role in the campaign but are actual friends of Clinton’s. Joel Benenson, Clinton’s chief strategist, and Jim Margolis, a senior adviser, are former Obama aides. Jake Sullivan, who was close to Clinton when she was secretary of state, is now a senior policy adviser. Philippe Reines, Clinton’s attack dog and public-affairs adviser at the State Department, and a former aide to Al Gore, is currently “in hibernation”—meaning not speaking publicly to the press, according to a campaign spokesman, as if that makes him exceptional. Jennifer Palmieri, special assistant in the Clinton White House in 1994, is communications director. Minyon Moore, who was the director of White House political affairs for Bill Clinton and worked for Hillary’s 2008 campaign, presented crucial research when Hillary Clinton was considering whether and how to run in 2016. She is involved in the current campaign on an informal basis.

Some of the original Chix no longer officially work for Clinton, driven out by fatigue or controversy. But they remain Clinton surrogates and help form the wall around her that keeps outsiders at a distance. The wall has narrow doorways to control what comes in and what goes out—the routing pathways of the Clinton e-mails make that clear. Operations are closely held. In 2009, when Clinton wished to give Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, a button saying RESET, to signal a fresh start to relations, her staff kept the Russia experts at arm’s length and insisted on making it themselves—and got the Russian word wrong. Her behavior is so controlled that she recently had to protest on national television: “I am a real person.” Even something unscripted comes across as planned—like her stop at a Chipotle in Ohio during a campaign swing last spring, which has been widely spun as an exercise in woman-of-the-people pandering. In truth, Clinton and Huma Abedin entered the restaurant in sunglasses, like Thelma and Louise, wanting simply to get something to eat. Hillary ordered a chicken burrito bowl and picked up the tray. They were recognized by no one. A New York Times reporter, alerted by a passing remark, confirmed the visitation later only by reviewing the restaurant’s security video.

By now, the people who constitute the wall—a changing cast of characters over time, but some of them in place for a quarter-century—have built walls of their own and can be as hard to reach as Clinton herself. It is like the fortified Western Front after years of bloody stalemate. Try to penetrate, making your way across a landscape strewn with lethal briefing books, and you’ll come face-to-face with people who are authorized to speak but deliberately say nothing; people who know everything but deliberately never speak; and people who talk all the time but don’t know what they’re talking about. There has never been such a well-defended and battle-hardened candidate for president of the United States. Bill Clinton, Obama, Carter, even Nixon—they all went through periods in the early stages of their campaigns when they were more or less open books, accessible to almost anyone, eager to talk. If Hillary Clinton wins, she will be the only president in history to have already had 24 years of Secret Service protection before she even takes the oath of office. As anyone who has had the experience knows, even a single day with the Secret Service can be isolating.

In reporting this story, I spoke with current and former members of Hillary Clinton’s staff, going back to Bill Clinton’s first campaign for the presidency; with people who have advised Hillary at every stage of her career; and with people who have covered her and run campaigns against her. Most of those I spoke to insisted that the conversations be off the record. They had to be cajoled even into “background” attribution. The most common refrain I heard was “I just don’t want anyone to know we had this conversation.” Setting up an interview with Nick Merrill, the Clinton campaign’s traveling press secretary, who himself has his own scheduler, required more than 40 e-mails, and it took place only after six canceled calls. This is the man who is Clinton’s public interface with the world. One longtime Clinton adviser agreed to meet with me and made an appointment, and then, when I e-mailed to confirm the meeting, retreated into radio silence.

The first thing many people I spoke to for this story told me was to watch out for the people who weren’t really close to Hillary but pretended to be. It was a reminder of the constant jockeying for position within her world. Nick Merrill told me that he had worked with Clinton for nearly 10 years, but if he were going to give me a list of 10 people who really knew her, he himself wouldn’t be on it. “Everyone says they have a deep and abiding relationship with her,” he said, “but you have to be careful.” Being in her inner circle is as much about keeping people out as anything else. It is a recurring theme, and it has deep roots. “The biggest mistake of the American press,” Maggie Williams told The New York Times in 1999, “is thinking they know her.”

III. Rosebud Moment?

Maybe there was a time when it was different, but if so, you’d probably have to go back to the 1970s, before Hillary Clinton, a young lawyer newly married to Bill, first experienced the sharp-elbowed indignities of public life. From the moment she had to live as a public figure, the pattern we know today began to assert itself.

After he was elected governor of Arkansas, in 1978, Bill Clinton was asked by an A.P. reporter about his wife’s decision to keep using her maiden name, Rodham, as her own—a practice that raised eyebrows in Hillary’s socially conservative adopted state. “She decided to do that when she was nine, long before women’s lib came along,” Bill answered. “People wouldn’t mind if they knew how old-fashioned she was in every conceivable way.” It was an early nod to the distance that has always existed between Hillary’s public persona and her private one. After the election, Hillary herself gave a lengthy interview to a local news program; the video was unearthed by BuzzFeed earlier this year. The soft-spoken First Lady of Arkansas was 31, wearing her then signature thick glasses, and she patiently answered questions about why she insisted on continuing to work at a Little Rock law firm, why she and Bill didn’t have any children yet, and whether she felt Arkansas was unprogressive. On the traditional responsibilities of a First Lady, the interviewer commented, “One gets the impression that you’re really not all that interested.” In Clinton’s voice a soft southern accent came and went—grafted onto a default accent that comes from northern Illinois—and at one point she responded to a question, again, about her name, noting that “a lot of people have images that are in no way related to reality…. And there’s really not much that one can do about that.” But in the end the Clintons did do something. After Bill Clinton lost the 1980 election, he cut his hair a little shorter and hired some older advisers. And Hillary pulled back. Hillary Rodham became Hillary Rodham Clinton and campaigned with Bill full-time to prove she was just as old-fashioned as her husband said she was. For reasons of expedience, she suppressed her own identity. If Clinton’s attitude has a Rosebud moment, this may be it.

On occasion, in the early days, she was willing to enter the fray—until circumstances made it clear that she wasn’t very good at it, or that she hated it, or that it accomplished very little. When Bill Clinton in early 1992 was thrown back on his heels by allegations of an affair with a woman named Gennifer Flowers, Hillary dismissed the rumors by reminding people that the Star supermarket tabloid, which had broken the story, was a publication that ran articles “about people with cows’ heads.” At a roast for then Democratic National Committee chairman Ron Brown, a week after the story appeared, Hillary engaged in a lengthy, playful, and (from today’s perspective) cringe-inducing speech in which she said she had the answer to the question “It’s 10 o’clock and where is Bill Clinton?” She told the audience that her husband was back in Little Rock, Arkansas, “with the other woman in his life”—his daughter, Chelsea.

But she changed course quickly, and permanently. In the famous 60 Minutes appearance after the Flowers story surfaced—an interview in which Bill Clinton denied the Flowers affair but neither Clinton would address whether he had ever been unfaithful—Hillary told Steve Kroft, “We’ve gone further than anybody we know of, and that’s all we’re going to say.” Those words—“that’s all we’re going to say”—could be the motto on her coat of arms.

After this, there were no more jokes about how much more money she made than her husband. She grew more guarded and occasionally she lost her sense of humor. With a group of reporters in March of 1992 she faced questions about whether her corporate law job at a prominent firm in Little Rock posed a conflict of interest, given that her husband was governor. Frustrated, she replied, “I’ve done the best I can to lead my life…. I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas.” This came across as a denigration of women who baked cookies and had teas—meaning stay-at-home moms—and Clinton was attacked. Once again she pulled back. Gone was the “two presidents for the price of one” idea that the Clintons had floated for a time. In January 1993, when asked about her future role in the White House, Clinton was playing second fiddle: “I’m going to do what my husband asks me to do.”

Press reports at the time referred to how hurt she was during the campaign by the depiction of her as a modern-day Lady Macbeth. A U.S. News & World Report article mentioned her portrayal in the media as an “overbearing yuppie wife from hell.” Even as she tried to soften her image, Clinton was retreating from the media and taking refuge within a close circle of her own making—the Chix. When she set out to draft health-care legislation, she assembled another group, a cadre of policy experts, and held all discussions behind closed doors. The result was anger, suspicion, and a lawsuit. A USA Today article from May 1993 quoted Andrew Rosenthal, who was then the Washington editor of The New York Times, on Hillary’s studied aloofness: “I’m quite astonished. Given the fact that this woman is one of the key policymakers in the United States of America, we’re very interested in talking to her and we have almost no access to her.”

And they would never get much. The Clinton White House generated a series of scandals and run-ins with the press that prompted Hillary to tighten the circle around herself. Even before the health-care implosion there was a major New York Times article, in 1992, about a Clinton investment in a real-estate venture, the Whitewater Development Corporation, that eventually failed. Questions about the arrangement blossomed into a full-blown rolling investigation into every aspect of the Clinton presidency; to deal with it, Hillary would come to rely on a group of legal advisers that included attorney David Kendall, who told her not to read the newspapers or watch television and who became, as Clinton put it, “my main link to the outside world.” Staff members were tasked to tell Clinton what they felt she needed to know. In the spring of 1993, the Travelgate scandal hit: the Clintons were suspected of firing the staff of the White House travel office in order to replace it with a firm that had ties to themselves. The Clintons were absolved of the charges, but Hillary unwittingly made false statements to investigators. That July, her close friend and confidant Vince Foster committed suicide after enduring intense pressure from the press throughout the early scandals of the Clinton presidency. Then, in December 1993, The American Spectator, a conservative monthly, printed an article sourced to four Arkansas troopers who claimed they had helped procure women for Bill Clinton when he was governor. As Whitewater dragged on, Harold Ickes, a lawyer who had become Bill Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, headed up a Whitewater Response Team and became a crucial Hillary defender. The scrutiny unleashed by Whitewater soon turned to Clinton’s “improper relationship” with Monica Lewinsky. Hillary spoke to hardly anyone about the Lewinsky affair but evidently leaned heavily on Diane Blair, an old friend from Arkansas. Blair’s husband, James, had been the chief counsel to Tyson Foods and had helped Hillary earn nearly $100,000 in profits from trading in commodity futures in the late 1970s.

In 1999, as the Senate was voting on her husband’s impeachment, Clinton was contemplating the next chapter in her career, one that Maggie Williams herself called “kooky”: running for the Senate. Clinton eventually embarked on a highly orchestrated “listening tour” through New York State, during which she relied on many of her old advisers, including Williams and Grunwald, and later added new ones, such as Philippe Reines. (At the State Department, Reines would be the person responsible for the mistranslated RESET button.) As a candidate for senator, she briefly opened up. The local press noticed how she was emerging from what the New York Post called “Hillary in Hiding.” Clinton won the Senate election, and a second one, and in due course began to explore a White House run. Most of her veteran White House and Senate staff would prove themselves to be notoriously closemouthed throughout the 2008 campaign, though internal divisions among a few advisers led to leaks of strategy documents and other private campaign communications. After Hillary finished third in Iowa and Obama swept four later primaries, she pushed out her campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, who had been with her since her earliest days in the White House, and brought in Maggie Williams. One of the original Chix had replaced another.

IV. Like a Daughter

In the first three months of her current presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton spent around $6 million on more than 300 employees, among the largest expenditure categories of the campaign. One observer noted that her team seemed set up to fight the last battle: “If you watch her decisions, it’s making up for what she didn’t do the last time.” She was criticized in 2008 for being too insular and working only with people who were blindly loyal. The Praetorian Guard has been expanded to include men close to Obama, such as Joel Benenson and Jim Margolis. Both were central to Obama’s 2008 campaign, and in fact Benenson had spent some of it sharpening a message that, in part, portrayed Clinton as poll-driven and inauthentic. The influx of these new advisers may have been deliberate, but it comes with a downside. As one former Clinton aide told me, the management of Hillary Clinton is not always straightforward: “If you don’t know Hillary Clinton and she yells at you and says, ‘That’s a stupid idea,’ these people are listening to her. They don’t realize you need to give it time, and then go back”—at which point she may be persuadable. This aide went as far as to suggest that Clinton’s first political instincts were generally misguided and that she has little sense of how deficient she is as a campaigner.

There are still some prominent old faces. Chairing Clinton’s campaign is Democratic Party stalwart John Podesta, a former counselor to Obama, who left the White House in February. Podesta, 66, served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff during his tumultuous second term. As the Monica Lewinsky story played out, Podesta reportedly threatened to fire anyone caught talking about the matter, not just in the press but in the hallways of the White House. Podesta is disciplined and strategic, and is often referred to as the “adult supervision” that will prevent anything like the disarray of 2008. He is not an apostle of openness.

Mandy Grunwald, a senior adviser for communications, has perhaps the longest relationship with the Clintons of anyone in the current campaign. Grunwald faced her first big political challenge with the Gennifer Flowers allegations. Appearing on Nightline, with Ted Koppel, then at the height of his popularity, she berated him for letting a “trashy supermarket tabloid” set the agenda. During a victory press conference the day after Clinton won the ‘92 election, Grunwald was the only female adviser onstage, in the shoulder pads and sneakers of the era. She advised Hillary during the Whitewater investigation and during her 2008 presidential campaign. Her sister, a novelist, once wrote about Grunwald in Glamour magazine: “She was older. Braver. Taller. Meaner. Stronger.” Though never far from the Clintons, Grunwald has amassed an impressive array of other clients, including Senator Elizabeth Warren. It was in fact Grunwald’s appointment to Clinton’s campaign that signaled Warren’s decisive move not to run in this election.

The circle around Clinton includes some decidedly odd characters. When Clinton went to the State Department, in 2009, she wanted to bring along Sidney Blumenthal, a former reporter who had served in the Clinton White House and been a senior adviser during her 2008 campaign. Rahm Emanuel blocked the effort, mainly because Blumenthal had been so vicious about Obama during the election. But Clinton kept Blumenthal in a shadow capacity, and he was employed by the Clinton Foundation. From the evidence of the State Department e-mails, he remained in close contact with Clinton. His tone is at once sycophantic and preachy, and he weighs in on many subjects. He wrote Clinton with an analysis, based on “an extremely sensitive source,” of the political situation in Libya. He described John Boehner, soon to be the House Speaker, as “louche, alcoholic, lazy, and without any commitment to any principle.” He attempted to pull Clinton into efforts to endorse Tony Blair for president of the European Council and offered advice for a speech she was delivering in Germany. In another e-mail, with the subject line “H: Yes, there is a vast right wing conspiracy,” Blumenthal forwarded Jane Mayer’s 2010 New Yorker piece on the Koch brothers’ funding of right-wing causes. “Ah, a little lite vacation reading!,” Clinton responded.

One of Clinton’s most trusted aides is Huma Abedin, vice-chairwoman of the current campaign, who began her work with the Clintons in 1996 as an intern. Abedin is as secretive as Clinton herself, if not more so, and she is the primary gatekeeper. She often forwards press coverage and other messages, highlighting once again the mediating membrane that exists between Hillary and ordinary reality. Abedin is one of the State Department employees who had a clintonemail.com e-mail account, and in 2012, after she stepped down as deputy chief of staff, she was granted “special government employee” status, which allowed her to continue at the State Department while working as a consultant for the Clinton Foundation and Teneo (a firm co-founded by Douglas Band, a former Clinton aide). That Abedin’s husband, former congressman Anthony Weiner, was caught tweeting photos of his crotch and then lying about it adds a strange symmetry to Abedin’s relationship with Hillary Clinton.

Clinton is deeply reliant on Abedin, who, in addition to her other campaign responsibilities, occasionally fills in as tech support. In an exchange with Clinton, revealed in the State Department e-mails, Abedin walks her boss through a “secure” fax connection. The subject line from Abedin to Clinton reads, “Can you hang up the fax line, they will call again and try fax.” Clinton responds, “I thought it was supposed to be off hook to work?”

“Yes but hang up one more time. So they can reestablish the line.”

“I did.”

“Just pick up phone and hang it up. And leave it hung up.”

“I’ve done it twice now.”

At a celebration for Huma Abedin’s wedding, Clinton said, “I have one daughter. But if I had a second daughter, it would [be] Huma.”

V. “You Don’t Have to Do This”

The precise moment that Hillary Clinton decided to run for president a second time is a matter of debate. A Saturday Night Live skit in March featured a sonogram of Hillary in utero, waving a campaign sign. But people close to Hillary say that she wavered for years about the decision to run in 2016. Some of the recently released e-mails indicate that Clinton had carefully watched the political ambitions of other potential candidates, such as David Petraeus, and used her circle to gauge the political climate. After her excruciating 2008 loss to Barack Obama, she told people she would not run again. Eventually, aided by polling and research carried out by the Dewey Square Group, a political consultancy where Minyon Moore is a principal, which sketched a possible route to victory, she came around to the idea. Moore had been an assistant to Bill Clinton when he was president and grew close to Hillary. She was a senior adviser in the 2008 campaign. With roots in Chicago and an expertise in state and local affairs, Moore is a key liaison with the African-American community. When Clinton left the State Department, Moore told me, there was “an instant hue and cry from many of her supporters” for her to run for president again. “But she had not had a chance to think, eat, sleep.” What she wanted to do was take some time to unwind. “If there is such a thing as normal for Hillary Clinton, she wanted to do that,” Moore said. “She had to get that space.” Chelsea was thinking about starting a family. The Clinton Foundation was always there as a comfortable roost. During that time of contemplative unwinding, Clinton made more than $12 million, according to Bloomberg, mostly from her second memoir and by giving dozens of speeches to corporations and other groups. Chelsea did have a baby. And soon after, Clinton was largely decided.

Even so, some of those closest to Clinton advised her to stay on the sidelines. Cheryl Mills, her former chief of staff at State, told Clinton that “you don’t have to do this,” according to someone with knowledge of the conversation. Maggie Williams was equally forceful about her concerns. Her sentiment was “I wish you wouldn’t do it,” this person said. A former Clinton aide laid out for me one rationale that circulated last year, arguing against a run: that Clinton had achieved enough success as Secretary of State—“icon status”—to wash away all the bad memories of 2008. She could now have a global voice on any issue she wanted. If she ran for president again, she risked being dragged into the muck of a political campaign, and attacked, and all of that aura of greatness would be washed away.

Mills, in particular, has become a focal point of the current campaign, even though she is not officially a part of it and may never be. Like her former boss, Mills has come under criticism from some members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, in particular for what they characterize as her attempts to align talking points of various officials in the aftermath of the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound there. Mills, like Abedin, was given special-government-employee status, an affiliation that allowed her, at the end of her tenure at the State Department, to continue working on Haiti reconstruction as special envoy. The status permits people to work for the government while pursuing careers in the private sector; Senator Chuck Grassley, who heads the Judiciary Committee, has questioned Clinton’s use of the program. Mills’s e-mails with Clinton reveal a relationship far more egalitarian than is the case with other advisers. In one e-mail, Mills joked to Clinton about a video of her dancing: “You shake your tail feathers girl!” More than Abedin, Mills is an equal. She also has a long history with the Clintons. In 1999, as deputy counsel to the president, she became something of a star during the impeachment trial for defending Bill Clinton against allegations of obstruction of justice. “If you love the rule of law, you must love it in all of its applications,” she argued. “You cannot only love it when it provides the verdict you seek.”

Maggie Williams’s relationship dates back to the 1980s, when she was working at the Children’s Defense Fund and Clinton chaired the board. Williams served not only as Hillary’s chief of staff when she was First Lady but at the same time as an assistant to Bill Clinton. She was the first person to hold both positions at once. In 1995, in the middle of the congressional hearings on Whitewater, Williams had to testify about her actions in the immediate aftermath of Vince Foster’s suicide. A Secret Service officer claimed that he had seen Williams carrying folders out of Foster’s office the night he was found; a tearful Williams said she had not done so. In 1997, after Bill Clinton was re-elected, Williams got married and decided to take off for Paris with her husband, who would work at the U.S. Embassy there while she did communications consulting. But this didn’t mean a break with her former bosses. In the fall of 1997, Bill Clinton flew Williams and some others to Washington as a surprise for Hillary’s 50th birthday. And just a short while later, in 1999, Williams was back in the fold, along with a few other formerly burned-out Clinton aides, helping Clinton as part of the exploratory committee for her Senate campaign. Then, in the early 2000s, she worked for Bill again, managing his Clinton Foundation staff. After a short break, she returned in an attempt to salvage Hillary’s nose-diving 2008 presidential campaign. In June of 2014, Williams was named the director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

VI. “Fuck This Shit”

Hillary Clinton’s campaign spent the summer on its heels. In March 2015, when The New York Times reported on Clinton’s exclusive use of a private e-mail account while secretary of state, it must have looked to many in the campaign a lot like every other middling scandal that Hillaryland had ever dealt with. Her advisers seem to have a model that works for this kind of thing: (1) Make a strong legal case. (2) Come out guns blazing. (3) Don’t yield an inch.

The e-mail scandal is the perfect distillation of how Hillary’s wall of protection makes matters worse. Her exclusive use of the Clintons’ personal e-mail server while secretary of state appears born out of a defensive instinct for secrecy. The eye-rolling dismissiveness with which Clinton herself initially greeted the revelation, and the stonewalling nature of the response by her surrogates, have only fed the scandal more oxygen. Before Clinton began at the State Department, she and her aides arranged to create a private e-mail account on a server linked to her home in Chappaqua. An Obama-administration official whose tenure coincided with Clinton’s at the State Department empathized with Hillary. “I understand why she did this. We are targeted all the time in the U.S. government, and there is no more vulnerable feeling than putting your thoughts on a government e-mail.” In July, the Office of Personnel Management said that two major breaches last year of U.S.-government databases potentially compromised sensitive information involving at least 22 million federal employees and contractors, together with their families and friends. “If you are Hillary Clinton and coming into government, of course she would use a personal e-mail account,” this administration official said. When she finally handed over the e-mails, she likely “erased stuff to protect her kid or her husband. Maybe she doesn’t want her J. Crew size out there. Everything she did is actually human-scale stuff and totally relatable. It may not be completely on the level, but it’s completely relatable.” But that’s not the problem, this official said. “It’s all the obfuscating and the ‘Fuck this shit’ attitude.” That said, it’s worth noting that other government employees manage to maintain a personal account for personal matters and a government account for official business. Clinton has come to acknowledge that the use of a private e-mail account was something she regretted. She has also said that she is sorry that some people have found her actions “confusing.” She finally got around to plain-old sorry in September, but only after months of saying she did nothing wrong.

The persistence of the e-mail scandal has surfaced frustration among other Democrats about the campaign’s inability to move on. Her advisers have been second-guessed and nitpicked about their responses. David Axelrod, the former chief campaign strategist and senior adviser to President Obama, defended her team: “I’ve worked with a lot of these people, and they are smart and talented. They didn’t become less smart or talented overnight.” But the bright lights on Clinton and her campaign affect all of them.

Going to battle with the press is still one of Clinton’s most reliable fallback measures. In late July, The New York Times published a story erroneously alleging that a criminal inquiry was potentially being sought into Clinton’s use of her private e-mail while secretary of state. The Times tweaked the online story slightly but significantly and didn’t issue a correction until later, clarifying that the inquiry was into “the potential compromise of classified information in connection with” her e-mail account, not specifically into her. Soon after, the Times also conceded that the inquiry was not criminal, either, and even issued an editor’s note, attempting to account for the errors. Just as the story seemed to be dying down, Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director, sent a nearly 2,000-word letter to the paper’s executive editor, accusing the Times of an “apparent abandonment of standard journalistic practices.” When the paper did not publish Palmieri’s letter, the campaign then forwarded it to other media outlets. It didn’t escape notice that Palmieri’s letter was longer than the initial article in the Times.

Palmieri’s history with Hillary Clinton dates back to 1994, when she was special assistant to Leon Panetta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. (It was at a birthday party for Palmieri in 1995 that Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, made eye contact as a prelude to their first sexual encounter.) She eventually became a deputy press secretary for Bill Clinton and later served as director of communications for Obama. She is best known in Washington for her ties to the late Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of the disgraced candidate John Edwards, and there may be clues in that relationship to her bond with Hillary. Palmieri worked on both of Edwards’s presidential campaigns, in 2004 and 2008. According to testimony she gave during John Edwards’s 2012 trial—he was charged with using campaign funds to hide his pregnant mistress, Rielle Hunter, and was later acquitted on one count, with a mistrial declared on the others—Palmieri told Edwards to his face that she didn’t think he was telling the truth about the paternity of Hunter’s child. She also testified that she had frequently told Elizabeth Edwards, in moments when Elizabeth was in denial, that she thought her husband was lying to her.

VII. Wounded Warrior

Whatever the changes in her name, her hair, her role, and her identity, Hillary Clinton has always been a lightning rod. From the moment she entered public life, she has had people selling her softer side, starting with her husband. She has always relied on other people to open her “real” self up to the public, because it is not a job she herself is seemingly able or willing to do. On the rare occasions when it happens, it is an accident—as when, this past summer, she spoke candidly backstage to organizers of a Black Lives Matter event, a conversation that was captured on a participant’s cell phone and soon went public. In it, Clinton told activists that they needed a specific agenda to get more than “lip service.” When pressed, her voice hardened, and she said, “Look, I don’t believe you change hearts. I believe you change laws; you change allocation of resources; you change the way systems operate.” Clinton learned early, from experience, that honesty and candor rarely serve her well. She prizes loyalty to the point that staffers who can tell her what she doesn’t want to hear are notable exceptions to the rule. Because she has been burned, exposed, misunderstood, and mocked, she has grown ever more guarded. She listens to plenty of advisers on policy issues, but on matters close to home she is a student of her own history. And, as one administration official told me, for all the troubles she faces, “there’s not a single candidate out there who wouldn’t trade places with her.”

THIS CAMPAIGN IS LIKE A TURING TEST OF WHETHER HILLARY IS INDEED
HERSELF.

According to current and former members of the inner circle, there is something extremely winning about Clinton that only these people see: her wit, her generosity, her intelligence, or some combination of all of those things. Tom Nides, a former deputy secretary at State, cited her loyalty, and “not just to the people who worked for her.” Despite the fierce battle with Obama during the 2008 campaign, her State Department was decidedly quiet in any criticism of the White House: “She wouldn’t tolerate it.” One of the most potent elements of her personality is her woundedness, what she’s been through, and how she soldiers on despite all that. Her image as a “fighter” has become a central tenet of this current campaign, and as much as she must want to shed her history and its embarrassments, she would be nothing without them. “She’s built up such an army of allies and allegiances that it’s very difficult for her to hand over the strategic thinking to one person,” the administration official told me. “It’s not about the parts—it’s the sum of the parts. A lot of what holds her back is this unwieldy apparatus that doesn’t have a lot of direction from her.”

The wall around Clinton has a self-sustaining, self-justifying nature. It may have been built with an understandable purpose, but it now exists partly because it has been around for a long time, and living behind it has for Clinton become a part of whatever “normal” is for her. To a great degree, she is her staff and her staff is she. Most politicians maintain a separation between themselves and the people who work for them. The staff’s relationships with Hillary are co-dependent and intertwined. They’ve been protecting her for so long—sheltering her, telling her what to read and what not to read, praising her, and occasionally talking tough with her—it’s hard to tell who is running things. This campaign is like a Turing Test of whether Hillary is indeed herself.

There is a moment in the State Department e-mails when Cheryl Mills sends a Washington Post story about a bank heist in Virginia where the assailant wore a Hillary Clinton mask. In response, Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, deadpanned about his client: “She does, uh, have an alibi, I presume?” Clinton wrote back, “Should I be flattered? Even a little bit?” Later, she seems to have begun to worry. “Do you think the guy chose that mask or just picked up the nearest one?” One wonders if that’s a question Clinton ever asks of herself.

Carlene Bauer contributed historical research on Hillary Clinton and her advisers.